


Are We Sinking? (Call Me Crazy)

by GideonGraystairs



Series: Tumblr Fics [20]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV), The Mortal Instruments Series - Cassandra Clare
Genre: Alec Lightwood Deserves Nice Things, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Established Relationship, Insecure Alec Lightwood, M/M, Miscommunication, Relationship Discussions, Self-Esteem Issues
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-22
Updated: 2017-05-22
Packaged: 2018-11-03 20:46:33
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,034
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10975023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GideonGraystairs/pseuds/GideonGraystairs
Summary: There's acid in his throat and a coiling in his gut at the way he can whole-heartedly love someone who doesn't seem to love him even half as much.





	Are We Sinking? (Call Me Crazy)

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on [Tumblr](http://raphaelsantiago.co.vu) 10/13/2016.
> 
> Requested by Anonymous as a line of dialogue prompt: "There is no way you're putting eyeliner on me!" For Malec please, if you're still doing this. (I love your writing)
> 
> There's no way she could make this angsty, they thought. She'll be forced to write fluff, they thought. They were wrong.

“Alec,” Izzy offers patiently from the bed, propped up against the pillows as she flips through a magazine. She doesn’t glance up, enthralled by trashy gossip that isn’t anywhere close to true. Dressed to the nines in a form-fitting dress and high-heeled boots from hell, she’s completely at home among Magnus’s expensive foreign pillows and hand-embroidered sheets from Japan. “Stop arguing. You know you aren’t going to win.”

The man in question merely huffs, irritated and beyond peeved. Logically, Alec does know that winning an argument against his sister is hard enough, but when she’s teamed up with his boyfriend it may as well be impossible. Logically, he’s smart enough to recognize that the moment he agreed to attend the party (some warlock he doesn’t know’s two billionth birthday or something) was the moment this became a lost cause. _Logically,_ he knows there’s absolutely nothing he can say here to convince them not to doll him up and parade him out the door like a prized pony.

Alec doesn’t really care about logic when Magnus is coming at him with an eyeliner pencil and an overly ecstatic look on his face.

The ruffling of clothing fills the bedroom and stampedes out the open door to the rest of the apartment, the shadowhunter’s arms folded crossly over his chest and feet planted firmly on the floor. “Shut up, Isabelle,” he snaps, shooting a vicious glare in his sister’s direction. “No one asked you.”

She rolls her eyes. “What an original comeback.”

“Now, now,” Magnus tries to placate. “Children, stop bickering. The party starts in half an hour and if we’re late I’ll kill you both.”

Isabelle grumbles something under her breath, but returns to her mundie magazine. Her boots leave imprints on the sheets beneath her, digging into the mattress as she crosses her long legs and flicks her raven hair over her shoulder. Magnus doesn’t seem to notice, or rather doesn’t seem particularly concerned that she might leave holes in the bedding with her heels.

Alec gives the eyeliner another suspicious glance. His gut twists, and he decides to focus on something that has nothing to do with the problem at hand. “You wouldn’t kill me,” he mutters, more of a method of distraction than a real reply.

Magnus grins. His cat eyes glimmer, the smokey-eye he’s sporting making them all the more stunning, and rests a hand on his boyfriend’s thigh. His tanned skin is a contrast to the black jeans it rests on, his nails painted brilliant blue (“Aquamarine, _Alexander._ ”) and trimmed to perfection.

He’s almost hot enough to ignore the torture tools he’s got clasped in his other hand. Almost.

Not quite. Especially when the glimmer in his eyes is really more terrifying than a turn-on.

“No,” Alec decides firmly, shaking his head for the billionth time in the last hour. He’d drawn the line at being forced into skin-tight clothing and having his hair nearly ripped out of his skull with a comb and four hands slicked in gel. “There’s no fucking way I’m letting you put makeup on me.”

Magnus frowns, glimmer significantly less vibrant, but doesn’t get the chance to respond. His phone goes off from the bedside table, and he drops the pencil with a heavy sigh as he moves to retrieve it.

Alec watches him with something akin to relief. He loves his boyfriend, he does. It’s the only reason he’d agreed to attend this stupid party in the first place. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have limits, doesn’t have ideals and pieces of himself that he isn’t willing to give up. It’s not wrong - he shouldn’t have to change who he is to appease someone who’s meant to love him for being himself - but sometimes he feels guilty when he sees the disappointment written so clearly in the set of his boyfriend’s shoulders.

He catches his sister’s eye where she watches him carefully from the bed. Swallowing hard, he shakes his head minutely and prays she won’t say anything about whatever expression she caught him with.

Isabelle smiles warmly in that way she always does when they’re sharing a secret, soft and understanding like the time she asked if he was interested in Magnus. For as often as he’s frustrated by her meddling, she’s still one of the few people he loves with his whole heart and trusts with his whole being. He appreciates her most in these moments, where he doesn’t have to say a thing for her to understand what he’s thinking, and where she backs away from the lines he’s traced in the sand without any question.

Magnus drops his phone back on the bedside table.

“Darling,” he starts, turning towards the young man still seated at his makeup table. He looks determined, if a little frustrated and a small bit exasperated. There’s a downwards quirk to the corner of his mouth that forces Alec to look away. He busies himself staring at the chip in the door’s paint, which Magnus must have yet to notice considering it’s still there.

Silence. He glances back, confused. Magnus’s expression is softer, but less easy to read and much harder to digest.

“Isabelle,” he continues, an obvious change in direction as he seems to think better of whatever he was originally going to say. He turns towards her a moment too late, having been stuck searching Alec’s face for things the shadowhunter is terrified he may actually have found. “Could you excuse us for a moment?”

Magnus smiles serenely, sweetly, politely - like he does with Alec’s mother and the other members of the council. The kind of smile that’s always made Alec shift uncomfortably beside him, wishing he could so smoothly transition to formal niceties and meaningless conversation.

The smile he receives from his sister has the opposite effect - it’s the one she uses when she can tell he’s having a minor freak-out over something trivial. The kind of smile she gave him when a visiting shadowhunter at the institute asked to introduce him to her daughter.

It’s comforting.

“Just don’t get too carried away,” she teases lightheartedly, tucking a stray strand of hair behind her ear as she slips off the bed. She slides her finger between the pages of the magazine to save her place, sweeping out of the room with all the grace of a trained huntress. “We _do_ only have a half hour.”

Magnus’s reply is immediate and followed directly by a suggestive wink. “You can do plenty in half an hour.”

Isabelle wrinkles her nose, slamming the door shut behind her with slightly too much force. The room feels smaller without her in it, her personality big enough to stretch the walls around her. That, and the uncomfortable air of severity makes everything feel stifling and constricting.

Alec sits quietly, purposely not looking at Magnus. He plays with the discarded eyeliner pencil on the desk, watching the peeling label with eyes trained to see more than any other, and pretends to be entirely unconcerned over whatever his boyfriend can’t say with his sister in the room.

“Alec,” Magnus murmurs softly, tone gentle like he’s herding the most timid sheep in the flock. His feet pad across the carpeted floor (faded violet, this week), until the end of the bed is creaking beneath his weight as he takes his seat. Alec can see his knees and the tight pants that cover them where they rest just a few inches from his own. “ _Alexander_ , look at me.”

He hates it, the way he says it. That he says anything. Alec hates this entire situation, in fact. He never should have agreed to go to the party at all - should have politely declined over the phone, where he wouldn’t have seen the disappointment on Magnus’s face or have had his sister aggressively nudging him towards the answer she wanted.

Alec looks at him. “What?”

It’s not casual, not unconcerned. Alec doesn’t have the energy or the willpower to pretend with his words, too. It’s short and upset and snappy and just as exasperated as Magnus was only moments before.

His boyfriend sighs, closing his eyes and shaking his head like Alec is being completely ridiculous here. Which… Maybe he is being a little unreasonable. He knows he is. It’s two stripes of makeup on his eyes and two hours leaning against a wall while Magnus drinks and dances and his sister flirts with everything she has except real intention.

But it’s not. It’s giving in, again, to everything people want him to do, to be, and it’s letting the people he loves walk all over him. It’s his boyfriend and his sister saying they don’t like the way he is, that him being supremely uncomfortable is worth it so they can dress him up as someone else and pretend that it’s who he really is. It’s saying he’s okay changing and giving in and that it doesn’t hurt him to know that they don’t like him as he is.

“Why are you suddenly so upset?” Magnus asks, two minutes too late and unaware that ‘upset’ has now shifted to ‘dejected and infuriated’. He’s got a frown on his face, a crease between perfectly sculpted brows, and his painted nails drum half-moons into his thigh.

“Forget it,” Alec says, instead of his usual denial tactics. He brushes the hair from his eyes, catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror and withholds a cringe. Standing, he ignores the sharp twisting in his stomach and the pressure building around his chest. “We’re going to be late, and I don’t think Izzy wants to die.”

“Questionable,” Magnus offers, latching onto the opening for a quick comeback rather than addressing the issue sitting heavily between them.

Alec shoots him a nasty look at that, at the joke in bad taste and the acid in his throat and the coiling in his gut and the way he can whole-heartedly love someone who doesn’t seem to love him even half as much. It kind of makes him want to throw up, because lately it’s always like this and everything has been making him feel sick with anxiety. He’s never been good with stress in his personal life, has never been able to control the awful feeling any disquiet gives him, and it’s immensely frustrating when he’s so good with stress in his professional life. Hunting demons is hard work, but somehow staying content in a relationship seems ten times more difficult.

He shakes his head. He can’t do this now. Can’t do this _ever_. Besides, it’s not like there’s actually anything wrong with Magnus _or_ their relationship. It’s all in his head because he’s a fucked up mess of insecurity that can’t do anything right - apparently even picking out his own clothes.

“Wait,” Magnus rushes out suddenly, snatching his wrist to keep him from moving any closer to the exit. They’re both standing now, but the distance between their feet feels like a black chasm with no bridge to cross. “Come on. We have to talk about this, Alexander. The party can wait.”

He sounds sincere, if a little disgruntled and doubtful, but too harsh in his tone and too stern in his expression. Alec recoils with as much viciousness as he can manage, yanking back his wrist and turning to stare at the phone on the bedside table rather than the boyfriend in front of him.

“Don’t do that,” he mutters, intending for it to be an angry shout but achieving only a choked murmur. “Don’t say it like you’re reprimanding me. Like I’m being ridiculous. I’m _not_.”

Magnus looks taken aback. “I’m sorry…” he trails off slowly, tracing the shadowhunter’s features with the kind of wide-eyed uncertainty often given to unpredictably explosive people. “What did I do? If this is about the makeup, I’m not upset. It’s just _makeup_ , for God’s sake. I’ll force you into it some other time.”

He knows it’s supposed to be a joke, to be lighthearted and humourous and relieve some of the tension digging the chasm deeper until it’s an endless abyss of distrust. Alec knows that, he does, but he can’t help the way his face twists and his throat locks and he has to turn away because he’s so _angry_ but maybe he also feels like he might be about to cry.

Magnus notices, because Magnus always notices everything Alec doesn’t want him to and nothing Alec needs him to. He drops a hand to his partner’s shoulder, flinches when the action is violently rebuked, and swallows audibly where he now stands just behind the shaking shadowhunter.

“Alec,” he says again, but this time it’s as soft as the feathers that fill the stupidly expensive pillows he didn’t pay for and as raw as the tears building unbidden behind Alec’s closed eyelids. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I… I don’t know what I did. How am I supposed to apologize when I don’t know what I did?”

“You’re not,” Alec replies immediately, shaking his head. He stares harder at the phone and the lamp it sits beside, until he can convince himself the tears are from not blinking rather than something emotional. “I don’t expect you to. Can we please just go?”

“Alec,” Magnus replies, because the first thing he always says when Alec is being ridiculous is his name. “We’re not leaving until you tell me what’s wrong.”

“It’s _nothing_ ,” he repeats vehemently, praying to God that Magnus won’t make him turn to face him. He can’t keep his expression neutral anymore, everything inside him feeling like too much and too sudden and so close to spilling all over Magnus’s beautiful carpet.

His boyfriend is silent for a long moment, the worry wafting off of him something tangent in the air. His touch is so light Alec barely feels it at the base of his spine, a gesture meant to bring comfort but only succeeding in prying the floodgates open a little more.

“I just…” Alec starts in spite of himself and then stops when he thinks better of it. “I’m just being stupid. Izzy’s waiting. _Please_.”

He can’t see it, but he knows Magnus shakes his head. “Darling, it’s not stupid. If something’s bothering you, it’s not stupid. If it’s made you upset, then it’s something we should fix. Don’t act like your feelings aren’t valid - they are.”

Still, Alec hesitates. He’s acutely aware of Magnus’s hand resting on his lower back, acutely aware of his boyfriend’s watchful gaze on the back of his head. His throat feels full of lead and poison and, for one stupid moment, he worries that if he opens his mouth it will corrupt everything around him.

He swallows. “Sometimes it feels like you don’t love me for me. Like, you always want me to do things you know make me uncomfortable and you’re always… taking charge of how I look. That’s not right- I didn’t mean- God,” Alec groans, frustration leaching into his tone. He’s turned half around now, but he still can’t look at Magnus. “It’s just… I know how to dress myself. There’s nothing wrong with what I wear. I’m sorry you’d rather I were different, but I’m not.”

For a minute, silence fills the room again. It’s more thoughtful than accusing this time, like Magnus is actually trying to make sense of Alec’s word-vomit and take it to heart. His hand is at Alec’s waist now, the pad of his thumb rubbing soothing circles through the cotton of his t-shirt.

Finally, he sighs.

“Okay,” he concedes. “Okay, I see where you’re coming from. I’m sorry that I made you think I wish you were different. I don’t. I love you because you’re you, not because you’d look good in eye-liner or because tight clothes show off your arms. I want you to go to parties with me because I like spending time with you and I like parties, but you’re right. You don’t enjoy them and I know that and there’s a million things we could do instead that I’m sure I’d love just as much. We don’t have to go tonight, if you’d like. We can watch some stupid TV show and cuddle instead.”

Alec shakes his head immediately at that. His eyes are glossy and he thinks he still might cry, but it feels different now. He feels lighter.

Smiling sadly, he shakes his head again and rests his hand over Magnus’s. “No,” he says. “It’s fine. It’s your friend’s birthday, right?”

“My friend has had two hundred birthdays, and will probably have a hundred more. Besides, he’ll be too busy hitting on everything with a pulse to even notice my absence.”

Magnus’s expression is open, desperate, apologetic like he’s pleading with Alec to agree and thereby reassure him that everything’s okay between them now.

Which it mostly is. Because they still have to talk about it, about all the things Alec’s been feeling and not saying and the reason he never _feels_ like he can _say_ anything. About the compromises they haven’t figured out how to make and the dynamic they haven’t quite gotten right.

But it’s better. To know that they will. That Alec is allowed to get upset about things and Magnus’s isn’t going to think he’s ridiculous even when he is. (Which he actually isn’t because it’s a valid thing to be upset about, no matter how hard he’d tried to tell himself it wasn’t.)

Alec smiles, ducking his head and reaching a hand up to discreetly rub at his eyes. “Okay,” he agrees, because he doesn’t have any fight left in him - certainly not enough to survive a large gathering of drunk and overly friendly downworlders. “Izzy’s going to be upset that we’ve ruined her plans for the night.”

Magnus shakes his head, reaching up with the hand not on his boyfriend’s hip. It’s warm as he sweeps the remaining tears from Alec’s eyes without a word.

“She’ll understand,” he assures him, his smile positively adoring as he leans it to press their lips together. “And tomorrow, we can talk more about all of this. For now let’s just settle in and watch some old episodes of How I Met Your Mother.”


End file.
